The U.S. soccer team took their share of lumps in two World Cup qualifiers on the road last month. But now that the shoe is on the other foot – or at least the ball is on the other field. The American side of the field plans to take full advantage of some home cooking, starting with Wednesday night’s emphatic 7-0 whipping of outmanned Barbados at Foxboro.

After a 1-1 draw in Guatemala and a controversial 2-1 loss in Costa Rica, the Americans came home in last place in the semifinal round’s Group E; and a loss to Barbados could’ve crushed their qualifying hopes. But Wednesday’s win vaulted the U.S. (1-1-1) into second place, and into position to advance to the next round.

“We’re the best team in the group. Now we just have to go out and prove it,” said team captain Claudio Reyna, a St. Benedict’s (NJ) Prep graduate. And who’s to argue? Surely not Barbados.

Costa Rica (2-1) still leads with six points, while the U.S. has the tiebreaker over Guatemala (1-1-1) due to goal differential. Guatemala has scored three goals and allowed three, while the U.S. has a sterling plus-six ratio that could be the key to advancing to next year’s CONCACAF final round, which will send three teams to the 2002 World Cup.

“We didn’t make a point of trying to embarrass Barbados, but at the same time Barbados was ahead of us in points,” coach Bruce Arena shrugged. And forward Joe-Max Moore – who added to the whipping with a pair of goals that moved him to second on the all-time U.S. list with 22 – said running the score up was about necessity, not narcissism.

“It’s what we had to do,” Moore said. “This is a group match, and Barbados had been ahead of us in the group. If it comes down to goal-differential, scoring all those goals is important. I wasn’t embarrassed.”

The fact that historically the U.S. team has been embarrassed for taking beatings like that, not giving them, shows progress. The only other seven-goal wins for the U.S. were in 1993 against the Cayman Islands (8-1) and El Salvador (7-0), and they’ve never even scored seven in a qualifier; but they’ve lost by seven or more goals five different times. But Reyna warns not to get carried away by Wednesday’s lopsided win.

“To be fair, with all due respect, it wasn’t the strongest opponent we play,” Reyna said. “It’s a qualifier, and you never know how many goals you are going to need. It was a formality. We did the business. We came out aggressively like we said we would all week. We got the goals and now we’re back in it.”

Now that they’re back in the race, they have to run the second half better than they ran the first. That shouldn’t be a problem; they were the only team in Group E to play its first two games on the road, and halfway through the six-game semifinal slate, they’re still the only team to take a point on the road. Now, they have two more home games and a finale at Barbados.

The U.S. plays Guatemala on Sept. 3 at Washington and Costa Rica on Oct. 11 at Columbus, hoping to run its home unbeaten streak to 16. And the American fans are hoping to give their foes a taste of their own medicine.

With many of the 55,000 Guatemalans living in the D.C. area already snapping up tickets for the game at RFK, the U.S. Soccer Federation plans to seat a large number of them in the upper deck to isolate them. “We’re attempting to do that to try to gain as much of a home-field advantage as we can,” said spokesman Jim Moorhouse to the USA Today.

When the U.S. played in Guatemala, a local radio station parked speakers outside the team hotel and blasted music all night. Now a group of rabid U.S. fans in the D.C. area are reportedly planning to host an all-night party outside the Guatemalans’ hotel as payback.